Brief Introduction of Fire Brick Refractory Feature

A firebrick, firebrick, or refractory brick is a block of refractory ceramic material used in lining furnaces, kilns, fireboxes, and fireplaces. A refractory fire brick is built primarily to withstand high temperature, but will also usually have a low thermal conductivity for greater energy efficiency, Now, we will brief analysis its famous features:

Heat Retention Qualities of Fire Brick

    Fire brick is a common building material used in the construction of fireplace and furnace linings. This type of brick is used because it has insulating properties, as well as the ability to store heat. Since the material properties of the brick are so different from mortar and regular brick, firebrick is usually installed to be independent of the regular masonry construction.

Thermal Conductivity of Fire Brick

      Fire brick is typically used as an insulating material. Even so, ordinary dense fire brick has a fairly high thermal conductivity. The thermal conductivity of dense fire brick used to line fireplaces is 1.40 Watts per meter Kelvin (W/(m*K)). There are low density fire bricks used to line areas not subject to impact, such as furnaces. These fire bricks, composed of a silica ceramic, have a thermal conductivity as low as 0.24 W/(m*K).

Density of Fire Brick

       There are two main types of fire brick. The dense type is typically used to line fireplaces and fireboxes of stoves that get a lot of abrasion from materials being burned. The light type of fire brick is mostly used as an insulator in places where it is not subject to mechanical abuse.

     Dense fire brick has a density relative to water of 2.4, while light fire brick has a relative density of only 0.60. Since density is how much a material weighs compared to other materials of the same size, we use water as the basis of comparison for all materials.

    The specific heat of a material is the amount of energy it takes to heat one kilogram of the material one degree centigrade, measured in Kelvin. The energy is measured in Joules. The amount of energy that is stored in fire brick is then a function of the density of the brick multiplied by the specific heat of the brick material.

    A dense fire brick has an energy density of 2.52 kilojoules per cubic meter per degree Kelvin [kJ/(m3*K]. A light fire brick has an energy density of only 0.36 kJ/(m3*K). By comparison, an ordinary red fire brick has an energy density of 1.4 kJ/(m3*K).

    In summary, a dense fire brick stores about eight times as much heat energy as a light fire brick, and can transmit the heat to a cooler surface about five times faster.